This will be the last post at this blog, though it will remain open for comments for a while.

From now on I will be posting at a new new joint blog, called simply Climate Scepticism. The idea is that it is more efficient in terms of writing blog posts, reading blog posts, moderating comments and running a blog to have one joint blog, rather than several individuals running their own.

As far as I know it’s the first genuinely collaborative venture on the sceptical side (several other blogs have guest posts, but with one main blogger). Another novelty is the production of videos, thanks to the talents of Ian Woolley.

A year and a half ago there was some discussion of climate sceptics getting together and getting organised, See WUWT, Bishop Hill and Pointman.
The arguments in favour (presented by Pointman and Geoff Chambers) are that a coordinated effort would be more effective than a disorganised rabble, and that an organisation would be able to provide a spokesman in the unlikely event of the BBC wanting to adhere to its charter obligations by speaking to someone who didn’t think the end of the world was nigh. Arguments against are that climate sceptics tend to be loners who prefer to think for themselves rather than follow a group, that it could be difficult to find common ground for all to agree on, and that an organisation would be a focus for attacks. Although a majority voted Yes in the WUWT poll, nothing seems to have come of this, so effectively the Nos won.
The new blog might be a small step towards such a cooperative organisation, or at least an interesting experiment to see whether a collaboration is effective or completely unworkable.

So if you’ve been following this blog, please start following cliscep.com instead, and adjust your blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly.

On 17 September, Philippe Sands, QC and Professor of law at UCL, gave a public lecture (video here, slightly different text here) at Kings College London the UK Supreme Court, as part of a two-day meeting on Climate change and the rule of law.

In the introduction to the Philippe Sands lecture, Lord Carnwath says “The purpose of this conference is to stimulate such a debate…”. It will be interesting to see how Sands and others involved with the conference respond to the debate started by Robin’s piece.

Bergkamp doesn’t mince his words. The abstract includes: “Courts should refrain from examining and ruling on climate science, since they are neither authorized nor competent to rule in scientific disputes. Even if judicial competence is assumed, climate science is not ripe for adjudication. To the contrary, the politicization of the science and the socio-political construction of scientific consensus in the climate area render any attempt to rule impartially on the key scientific disputes futile and suspect. Whether in the form of an advisory opinion or otherwise, a court judgment would be perceived as taking sides and, thus, would only aggravate an already badly politicized situation. Courts, including the ICJ, should uphold the rule of law and respect the limits of their authority. They should therefore refuse to opine on climate science and refer scientific disputes back to the scientific community, which is where they belong.”

After an election involving representatives of 134 different countries, his replacement has been announced as Hoesung Lee, an economist from Korea, see IPCC press release. His CV reveals the intriguing fact that he worked for Exxon for three years in the 1970s. He has been involved with the IPCC since 1992, as part of IPCC WGIII, Mitigation of Climate Change.

Runner-up in the election Jean-Pascal van Ypersele might have been expected to congratulate Lee, but does not appear to have done so, though he did retweet someone describing himself as “the best IPCC Chair the IPCC never had”.

There is a hilarious video of a press conference with the new chair of the IPCC here:

It shows Hoesung Lee and the IPCC’s Head of Communications (who does not communicate his name). After a short introductory statement from Lee, the communications man asks (at about 06:30) “So are there any questions from journalists in the room?”. This is met with a silence so stony that one wonders whether there is anyone else in the room at all. He then asks “Do we have any questions yet from outside the room”. Again, there is silence, so apparently not. So the HoC asks his own question. At about 08:40 the process is repeated. Finally the “press conference” is put out of its misery by an emailed question from Megan Darby at 12:00, who asks about criticism that supporting carbon pricing as a priority represents a politicisation of the IPCC.

Another thing that never ceases to amaze me is the ability of the climate activist community to make make spectacular tactical blunders in the game of Climateball.

The most recent of these is the call for a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) investigation of “corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change”. The letter is dated 1 September, addressed to President Obama and the Attorney General, and signed by 20 people who in the letter describe themselves as climate scientists.

The letter seems to have been first found around Sept 16th and was discussed by Judith Curry who called it “more insane U.S. climate politics”. (Curry and others had been the target of another insane political attack, the “Grijalva witch-hunt“, just a few months earlier, which seems to have backfired badly). The sceptic blogosphere has given the letter considerableattention, while climate scientists have kept very quiet about it.

Those signing the letter included Jagadish Shukla, Ed Maibach and Barry Klinger. All three are at George Mason University. A painful irony here, as pointed out by Paul Driessen, is that George Mason was one of the creators of the US Bill of Rights!

As first noted by Roger Pielke, around 20 Sept, Shukla (left, the first name on the letter) seems to be doing rather well out of the climate change industry, as do members of his family. This was picked up by Bishop Hill on Sept 21 and then explored by Steve McIntyre on Sept 28th with his usual forensic detail. Shukla’s so-called “non-profit” organisation, IGES, pompously proclaiming itself as “in service of society”, was in fact paying him millions of dollars.

The second person to sign the letter is Ed Maibach (centre), whose research is in “Climate change communication, public health communication, social marketing”, and whose website says “His research currently focuses exclusively on how to mobilize populations to adopt behaviors and support public policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions…”. Yet the text of the letter says “as climate scientists we…”, so Maibach is misrepresenting his academic credentials by signing the letter – he is not, by any stretch, a climate scientist. This seems to be a fairly serious breach of professional integrity, in a letter to the President calling for prosecutions. It’s also curious that someone who is supposedly an expert in communication strategies should make such a communication blunder.

Also signing the letter is Barry Klinger (right). He attempted to defend the letter in a statement on his web page, repeating the oil and tobacco smears. He claimed that he did not recall any climate contrarians criticising Cuccinelli’s investigation of Mann. As pointed out by McIntyre, several did, and Klinger had absolutely no excuse for being unaware of this since the fact was even reported in the New York Times.

At this point the story might have gradually faded away. But it was kept alive by a continuing sequence of tactical blunders by the #Rico20 team.

On about 26 September (first noted in a comment at CA) the letter was removed from the IGES site. This was of course quite pointless, since the letter was available at the internet archive and elsewhere. This apparent admission of an error provoked considerable interest, see Donna Laframboise, Bishop Hill and WUWT.

Then on 29 Sept a new much shorter note appeared at the same URL where the original letter had been posted, saying:“The letter that was inadvertently posted on this web site has been removed. It was decided more than two years ago that the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) would be dissolved when the projects then undertaken by IGES would be completed. All research projects by IGES were completed in July 2015, and the IGES web site is in the process of being decommissioned.”
This raises further questions. How do you ‘inadvertently’ post a letter on a website? Was the research relating to all the money taken in 2014 really all completed by July 2015?

Also on 29 Sept, Klinger posted an update on his web page, in which he acknowledges his earlier error. He also says “My own ambivalence about the RICO letter…”. Why would you put your name to a letter to the President calling for prosecutions if you were ambivalent about it?

Oct 1: Lamar Smith, Chair of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee writes a letter to Shukla, regarding the funding of IGES, in particular “This letter raises serious concerns because IGES appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in partisan political activity…”. Expressing concern about removal of documents from the IGES website, he asks them to preserve all electronic documents back to 2009 and provide a list of all employees. See press release and letter.
WUWT reports Pat Michaels saying this may be the “largest science scandal in US history”, which seems way over the top to me.

Oct 8: Inside Climate News have their spin on the story. “I signed this letter as a private citizen on personal time, urging action on climate change, and I have been shocked by the reaction,” Shukla told InsideClimate News. “Any allegations of inappropriate behavior are untrue.”

Oct 16: Watchdog.org reports that Lamar Smith has written to NASA, NOAA and NSF, requesting information regarding funding related to IGES. The article has links to the letters, and also includes a good summary of the history of the story.

The self-delusion of climate activists in the media never ceases to amaze me.

The Pope is currently visiting the USA, and today gave a speech to Congress. Here is the text of his speech. It contains quite a bit of America-flattering, a lot of calls for ‘dialogue’, concern for the elderly, worries about violence, concern about the refugees, a call for an end to the death penalty, concern about poverty, some positive remarks about wealth creation, concern for the environment, worry about weapons, and the problems facing young people.

His speech did not mention climate change or global warming at all.

Yet here is how his speech was mis-reported by the deluded environment correspondents in the press:

All of these have taken something the Pope didn’t say – but presumably something they hoped he might have said – and made it into a headline.

Congratulations to Andy Revkin who correctly reported that the Pope “skirts environmental tussles”.
The BBC is reporting the speech as calling for an end to the death penalty and help for the migrants.

Update 25 Sept:

Here are some more journalists who have fooled themselves into thinking that the Pope’s speech to Congress was a call for action on climate change:

Another day, another speech by the Pope, this time to the UN. Full text here. In a 3768-word speech, there is one sentence mentioning climate: “I am similarly confident that the Paris Conference on Climatic Change will secure fundamental and effective agreements.”
I wonder how journalists will report the speech…

One of the many climate activist groups churning out propaganda, formerly known as RTCC (Responding to Climate Change), have completely revamped their website and changed their name to Climate Home, as explained in an introductory article by their director Ed King.

King shows his usual standards of integrity and openness by failing to mention the main change – which is that their articles no longer allow comments. Worse still, all the old articles still exist in the new system, but the comments seem to have been deleted.

The old version of the pages, with comments, cannot be found on the Internet Archive, because RTCC blocked it from search in their site. At the time of writing, they are available in Google’s cache – for example this article misrepresenting the Quentin Letts programme on the Met Office (no comments) can be found in the old form here (154 comments). But this will probably disappear very soon, as Google refreshes its cache. So if there are any comments or threads you want to save, do so now using Google’s cache.

Most of the articles at RTCC did not have as many comments as the one linked above, though this recent one had 93 comments, so it seems that several thousand comments must have been deleted. Of course, not all of these comments were of vital importance to preserve for posterity, but many were carefully argued with supporting links, such as many like this from Robin Guenier:

His article is full of amusing sound-bites from sceptics:
“I think it’s a big fat lie.”
“I think all this global warming crap is overblown.”
“The most ludicrous myth that has been forced upon the Earth since the world began.”
But despite the length of the article, there is virtually no attempt to look into the details or the reasoning of sceptic arguments. At one point he does try to do this, but gets hopelessly confused, claiming that climate sceptics show graphs of the upper troposphere when they should be looking at the lower troposphere. No John, it’s the lower troposphere data that sceptics point to, and it shows that the observed temperature is significantly below the model predictions.

There are two rather unpleasant sections, which show just how low people like Sutter are prepared to go. In one, he finds a statue of a stegosaurus with a sign saying it lived 5,000 years ago. Later, he finds some people whose relative died in a fire, and tells them that wildfires are predicted to increase.

There are some amusing aspects to Sutter’s piece. Despite claiming that he went to Oklahama to listen to the climate sceptics, he seems to have been so freaked out by having his cosy metropolitan-elite values challenged that in desperation he tries to find people who share his own views. He “made it a personal mission” and “wandered all over the county on a scavenger hunt for believers”.

His second defence mechanism is to go back to reciting his credo (the climate is changing, we are responsible, 97%…) and to seek support from other climate propagandists. The article, which, remember, is supposed to be about the views of climate sceptics, cites Lewandowsky, Marshall, Hayhoe, Leiserowitz and the Pope!

The only little piece of progress comes right at the end of the article, when he learns that climate sceptics do in fact care about the environment, and admits that it took him far too long to realize it. He quotes one man who describes climate change as “baloney” : “I’m a steward of the land out here. It’s my responsibility to see that even in drought times, the land is taken care of and the land is respected.”

Update 6 Aug:

Sutter has now updated his confused paragraph about the troposphere (suggesting that he may have read this blog). The edited version is just as confused and misleading, and it seems that this is thanks to the intervention of the notoriously unreliable Katie Hayhoe. The new inserted sentence from Hayhoe claims that “there were errors in troposphere data, which are commonly misused by climate skeptics”. I’ve asked Sutter if this latest RSS data showing the model/reality mismatch, linked above, contains “errors”.

Roger Pielke on twitter is not impressed by Sutter’s piece:Wow. @CNN sends a condescending reporter to Oklahoma to find out why people there are so stupid. Reminds me of Borat.If you want to understand why climate politics is pathologically politicized in the U.S. Read this mocking MSM “news”